The mayor of Oakland, California, on Tuesday announced a privately funded program that will give low-income families of color in the city $500 per month with no rules on how they can spend it.
The program is the latest experiment with a "guaranteed income," the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.
That the funds are privately raised does not matters. If a government administers a program that discriminates racially, it is violating the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. Now if this program was for all poor people, you could argue that it is likely to be counterproductive, even if most of the beneficiaries turned out to be black. But this is the sort of racism that the 14th Amendment prohibits. Oakland believes poor whites do not deserve relief from poverty, poor health, and lack of upward mobility. I can see strong recruiting opportunities for neo-Nazi groups in Oakland.
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